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Bonemat 4.0 beta including cortical-specific material mapping is now available from Rolling version!

Following the acceptance in Bone of our paper titled "Cortical bone mapping improves finite element strain prediction accuracy at the proximal femur”, we are releasing a fully new Bonemat version, BonematV4. This new version allows the user to map cortical-specific properties according to local estimates of cortical thickness and density, obtained with Cortical Bone Mapping algorithms from Stradwiew (or former Stradwin), a freeware developed by Graham Treece and colleagues at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge (https://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/Main/StradView).

Please refer to the paper for the essentials of BonematV4. A stable Bonemat V4 release, including full documentation, will be available in few months time. Stay tuned.

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What is Bonemat?

Bonemat is a freeware that maps on a Finite Element mesh bone elastic properties derived from Computed Tomography images.

Bonemat v3.2 can import CT images and FE models, interactively visualise them, and export the updated FE mesh once bone properties have been mapped. From this 3.2 version, Bonemat supports import/export to and from both Ansys and Abaqus, perhaps the two most used commercial FE packages.

Bonemat is mainly developed at Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli in Bologna, Italy, with the active collaboration of other researchers (see People and Collaborate). Bonemat has been presented in a few Publications in the past, and is being used in many studies.

How does Bonemat work?

Note for unconventional users (like most researchers)

Bonemat permits to map any scalar field from a regular (rectilinear) grid to any mesh (tetrahedral and hexahedral) contained in the same space domain. In the bone analogy, the most used and the one that gives its name to the application, the rectilinear grid is the CT grid, hosting a field of HU numbers, which is transformed into a field of Young's moduli thanks to well known (yet not fully established) theoretical or empirical relationships, and mapped to an FE mesh through numerical integration.

What is new with Bonemat v3.2?

The original idea and the first version date back to 1998. Refinements were made available to the research community in 2004 (new algorithm) and 2007 (first GUI). At last, in 2015 we developed a more user friendly version (v3.1) with interactive GUI with several CT/FE visualisation options, import/export to and from Ansys, and some documentation.

We are now issuing Bonemat v3.2, featuring several improvements:

Importers/Exporters:

Interface (Importer/Exporter) with Abaqus file format (this is the first fruit of a joint collaboration, with Elise Pegg at University of Bath)
Importers/Exporters can also handle submodels (components/assemblies)
Simplified generic mesh format for import/export
VRML exporter
VTK export supporting mesh rototranslation

Documentation (see also download):

Small test data (10 elements) for debugging purposes
Large test data (whole proximal femur, fully anonimysed)

Core application:

New operation to merge meshes
Copy and Paste now holds the position of meshes/volumes

GUI:

New icons for meshes/volumes and Toolbar
Icons added on Menu

Views:

Clearer drawing of mesh edges
Added mesh visualisation options

Bonemat is based on ALBA (Agile Library for Biomedical Applications) an open-source rapid application development framework for computer-aided medicine written in C++. The ALBA architecture is made of open source external libraries and components necessary to build applications. ALBA and related applications are developed through the Agile Software Development methodology, based on the approach of delivering software quickly and continuously by promoting customer involvement, continuous testing and planning, and close teamwork.

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